


orchid children

by dustorange



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, Good Brother Klaus Hargreeves, Recreational Drug Use, dealing with the journal entry about 0.04 being """cruel""", the order in which the kids left home except for. like. luther who is sort of the reason
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-02 09:01:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19195750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dustorange/pseuds/dustorange
Summary: Dad simply continues with breakfast. Why the hell shouldn’t Herr Karlson continue narrating petit déjeuner when six-sevenths of the children are still there? The fact that Five ran off doesn’t even seem like a big deal. Klaus figures it won’t last long. The record for an absence is held by Klaus himself: three long, punitory days in the mausoleum with nothing but some Goldfish crackers. Punishment for blowing smoke into Dad's face.Klaus is second-last to leave. Which is, you know, better than dead last.





	orchid children

Klaus had always thought that it would be better to _not_ see his siblings than to, say, see his siblings. He loved them, adored them, had listened silently and did nothing as their throats scraped raw with pleas to their dear daddy. But he didn’t want to see them.

He used to think about that on missions. Used to drive himself crazy over it, yanking the threads out of his sweatervest like they were eyelashes, tangling the argyle strands of his socks into angel hair. Eyes on the entrances and exits, mind on the hard blue question of whether he’d want to see his siblings when they were dead.

Diego, he’d thought, might be an okay ghost. A very good candidate for getting trapped in the lugubrious cavity between corporeality and the Good Old Great Beyond people always talk about too—very angry, unfinished business, would probably love to interact with Zak Bagans, check, check, check. Allison would be terrible; her power might actually still work, and ghosts have this certain, dizzyingly puissant little predisposition to haunt the living.

The deal is this. When someone dies, they get ground into nothing. Like sand. Sand has a glittering, halcyon youth as glass or shells or maybe a pretty rock. But when you’re sand—when you’re _dead_ —it’s not the same. Nothing that’s them is still there. There’s instincts, the ones that humans have, but there’s not empathy or intention or anything uncallous. Klaus has never met a good ghost. The best ones are silent or weepy or meek. But even those ones aren’t good. They just aren’t.

Good people don’t become ghosts.

But his siblings do a lot of, like, stabbing and impaling and capital-r Rumoring desperate people into shooting their money-hungry friends dead, which, at the very least, probably forfends the saving of their souls. Klaus mostly just sits outside and people-watches and ghost-watches, the latter of which is less a casual hobby and more a constant chaotic eschatological duty assigned to him by some higher power. The lookout doesn’t really rack up a lot of bad karma on his jiva unless the situation is being considered with utter and unfaltering holism.

Vanya’s likely safe. Sweet, benevolent, darling little Vanya. She’s not ever going to have any sins on her shoulders. White hands, clean black eyes, calloused thumbs. _She’s_ not ever going to haunt anybody.

But the rest of his siblings are running on piano wire, slicing the soles of their feet open right down the center because of their father, and there’s a certain shivering, uneven rush of his pulse that he finds when One and Two and Three ignore Six during dinner that he can’t really deny.

He’d rather not see his siblings at all. As ghosts, of course.

Five does not seem to take this into consideration whatsoever. Five decides that he’s ready to make temporal jumps. Five fucking ditches.

Father simply continues with breakfast. Why the hell shouldn’t Herr Karlson continue narrating petit déjeuner when six-sevenths of the children are still there? The fact that Five ran off doesn’t even seem like a big deal. Klaus figures it won’t last long. The record for an absence is held by Klaus himself: three long, punitory days in the mausoleum with nothing but some Goldfish crackers. Punishment for blowing smoke into Daddy’s face.

But the seventy-two hour mark rushes past like saltwater, and Vanya starts to falter at dinner, fork scraping against the porcelain portion of her still-full plate until Father gets onto her. She retorts, which almost gives Diego, sitting next to her, a heart attack. “Where’s Five? You haven’t even _looked_ for him!” She slams her hand down—a loud, startling sounds that rings like a heartbeat. Klaus could swear it pulsates.

“Number Seven.” Father’s voice is knife-crisp, cutting through whatever false echo exists. “To your _room_. Now.”

And Vanya withers. She withers. “Yes, Father.”

She doesn’t give up, though. Not on Five. Klaus stumbles downstairs to raid Father’s liquor cabinet and refill the bottles with good old American l’eau enough times to see a skinny shadow with a butter knife and a loaf of bread. He also has the munchies enough to stalk through the kitchen and eat the sandwiches when she’s fallen asleep at the counter.

The others give up. Klaus gives up. Bigger things to consider. Better things to smoke. One by one, his siblings start asking Klaus where Five is. If Klaus can see him. If Klaus can summon him. “I don’t know,” Klaus tells Luther. “I don’t know,” he tells Allison. “Who could say,” he tells Diego. “He’s in Amsterdam, probably—I hear it’s gorgeous this time of year,” he tells Ben.

The truth is that he can’t see Five. Wish fulfilled. That doesn’t mean he’s not dead, but it does mean that all the blood on his hands maybe wasn’t as bad as Klaus had assumed. He wasn’t bad enough to be a ghost. Or maybe, he thinks one night, not _all_ ghosts are evil. But he has no data to support that hypothesis, so it dies before it really starts.

Vanya holds out. Then, all of a sudden, she’s seventeen and begging Dad to let her go to some barebones music school upstate, and then all of her bags are packed, and she knocks twice on Klaus’s bedroom door.

Klaus is halfway out the window, and he briefly considers just falling the rest of the way to the lawn to get down before he yanks himself back over into his bed. “Come  _in_ ,” he sings, rubbing his ribs from the hard press of the dinged window ledge.

“Klaus?” The doorknob twists. The door stays closed. “I can’t get in.”

“Oh. It’s locked.” He tries to throw the hardcover Ben left on his nightstand. It hits the wall a meter to the right of the doorknob, thumping. Klaus waits a beat. “…Try now.”

“Now?” The doorknob twists again. “It’s still—”

“ _Ugh_.” Klaus moans, stands up, unlocks the door.

It isn’t what he expects. Vanya’s got a sad look on her high-planed face and a bottle of riesling in her crooked fingers. Her voice is too soft, almost wispy, thin as vanilla. “I brought you, um—I think this is a white wine?”

He snatches the bottle, fingers spanning the paper label. “Austrian, by the looks of it.” He flashes a smile at her. “Perfect for an Austrian like _me_. Like _mich_. Whatever.”

“I thought you were born in East Berlin.” The sad edges of her lips peek up indulgently. “I assumed you were German.”

“Well. You know what they say about assuming.” Klaus sniffs. Then he ushers her in, tilting his head outside the door to see if Dad or Pogo could be lurking in the blue-dark as they’re wont to. Lookout habits die hard, and that’s a _fact_. He relocks the door, assured. “What, dear sister, brings you to my humble abode?” He throws his arms out, fingers stretched to the sweeping curtains and dim fairy-lights, the neck of the wine slipping easily through his touch. “I thought you were on to bigger and _brighter_ things.”

Vanya’s quiet. “…I…”

“Spit it out,” Klaus says around the hard mouth of the bottle.

“I don’t want to—” She gestures vaguely, shifting. “Your powers, I didn’t want to force you to—”

The wine tastes bitter. And he can’t even assign the bitterness to Father’s odious palate. Fuck. “Oh.”

“I just. I. Before I go. Is Five—can you see him?” A moment swallows the silence. “Can you _see_ him?” whispers Vanya.

Klaus fumbles to recork the wine. It’ll go sour. He doesn’t care. “No,” he says finally. “I can’t.”

“You—” Vanya looks like the moon then, _bright_ , and her shoulders straighten. “Does that mean—he’s—he’s alive?”

Klaus kills the moon. “No.”

And Vanya goes off to college half-grieving while the rest of them are stuck staring at a stupid painting of a boy who might not even be dead.  

The rest of the year’s spotty. Soapy. Seventeen’s when Klaus gets into Oxycodone. He spends most of his time somnolent, asthenic, too damn dizzy to close his eyes.

Allison has this interview with _Seventeen_ , and she says all sorts of brother-sister stuff about Ben and Klaus and Diego, but she strays from the fed lines about Luther for some reason. Klaus’s memory from then is wine-soaked, barnacled with moth holes, but he has this memory, distinct as stars, of Luther’s giddy face falling like a cliff as he read the entretien, got to the part about _How many boys have you kissed, Miss Three?_ to which Allison apparently replied, _Three boys! [laughter]_.

“It’s fine,” Luther’s saying to himself. “It’s fine. I’ll just talk to her when she gets back. It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine,” Klaus says. “How has she kissed more boys than _me_? Where is she finding them? She doesn’t even sneak out!”

Klaus’s kisses:

  1. A surprisingly unchaste kiss from a skinny Parisian girl his age after the first fight with Gustave Eiffel. She gave him a little note and her purple bead bracelet, but the only thing she said in English was a choppy, “Hello.”
  2. Making out with this guy who was at a party that Klaus crashed to get alcohol after a particularly bad night at the mausoleum last year. Tacky pickup line, nice jawline, did cocaine off of Klaus’s stomach. Lines lines lines. His face hurt from smiling so much. Fun.
  3. Daniel.



Ben’s rereading _One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich_ for the ten-thousandth time because he’s achingly boring. He flips a page and sighs. “Somehow, I doubt that.”

“Okay, wow, contrary to what you might think, Benothy, I’m _not_ a crackwhore.” Klaus feels his face warm and his stomach twirl. It’s not—it’s not like that. Klaus knows what he looks like: the flushed, moon-cratered complexion; the thin skin and thinner bones; the wild gleam of rouge-glassed eyes. He looks crazy. He looks like an addict. Sure. He knows what he acts like. But.

“It’s funny how I never said that, but that’s still where your mind went. I meant that I doubt that Allison doesn’t sneak out.”

Luther jolts. “She would _never_!”

Ben ignores Luther. It’s a life-skill. “Remember that one time?”

‘That one time’ was when all of them, except for Luther—and Five and Vanya, of course—went out together at night, and Allison led them to a champagne-tint restaurant where the staff knew her name, and she paid for their absurdly expensive food with the money she’d made from her last photoshoot, a cheeky, half-hearted spread for _Teen Vogue._ It had been fun. Klaus had fun at least. He was responsible for a plurality of the bill.

And, logically, the only way people would have been able to know Allison personally at a restaurant would have been if she went there frequently. “Oh.”

Diego lifts his eyebrows meaningfully. “Yeah. ‘ _Oh_.’”

Klaus jumps. “Where’d you come from? I swear you weren’t here earlier.” He turns to Ben. “You see Diego too, right? He’s here?”

“I’m here.” Diego frowns. Suspicious.

“Sounds like something a ghost would say.” Klaus glances to the corner where a familiar childhood ghost usually lurks, a naked guy with sixth degree burns that died in a melting car. Nice friendly playmate. Doesn’t say much. His white bones are these sparkling things against the charred mass of his skin. It’s hard to tell if he’s got eyes, but whenever Klaus says something funny, he likes to look over at the man and share a look. Well, he doesn’t _like_ to, but the man is just sort of a vade mecum in Klaus’s vision, and Klaus is a very funny individual, so it’s almost the same. But Klaus blinks. The man isn’t there today. He isn’t there.

Oh, realizes Klaus. I’m _high_.

“Never mind.” Klaus pats Diego’s hand kindly. “You can carry right on.”

“Can I?” says Diego wryly. Diego’s an odd one. Honestly, Klaus thought he would have cut and run by now, dragging Mom with him. Mom’s what’s holding him back, really. They all know it. Diego tolerates the others, puts up with Luther, but he only ever had a connection with Vanya. He could breathe better without any of them. Hell. He needs them less than he needs breath.

It’s Allison who needs the breathing room.

Allison returns from LA with straightened shoulders and wide sunglasses the color of hydrangeas on acid. The moment she walks through the doors, though, Luther addresses the kissing situation without any deftness whatsoever, and he barrages her with questions until she breaks into tears, which he simultaneously fails to handle with sagacity and shirks responsibility for. “Allison, why are you _crying_?”

Her eyes shine. “Please, Luther, it’s not going to work. I’m _so_ sorry. I am. But please don’t make this harder. We’re just not _kids_. This isn’t cute anymore.”

It’s a rope. Nothing to be gained from holding on but ropeburn and hurt palms. It’s Khrushchev’s two men holding a rope with a knot in the center, pulling harder and harder until the knot’s there forever, like a winestain or a planet. It’s a rope, and Luther is the man that pulls. It’s a rope. It’s a rope.

His hand’s splayed ocean-wide on her arm, nails grooving the leather of her jacket with his grip, and it’s, “Allison, please, I,” but it’s different now, somehow, for whatever reason. She met someone in LA, maybe, some brown-eyed dreamboat that set her straight, because she’s turning away like a tide. Luther’s voice soars, frantic. “Allison! _Listen_ to me!”

“I—no. No. You listen to _me_.” Allison shakes. Klaus can see the unsteady rise-fall of her chest, the jump of her jaw. Her voice is low with emotion, thick with it: " _I_ heard a rumor…”

Her voice skids. Gives out. Her fingers fly to her face, eyes like Mom’s good porcelain plates, and she stumbles away from Luther. Rise-fall.

Klaus is the only other one downstairs when it happens. Diego’s off at that gym where he spends all his time now, and Ben’s sleeping off the aftereffects of individual training, which is in fact not individual whatsoever; his training is a team-building exercise with extra-dimensional tentacles that can crush humans like blackberries by cracking open a few of Ben’s ribs. And Klaus isn’t proud of it, but he’s gotten…worse. Apathetic. Woozy. In agony all the time, in the purgatory between gelid and boiling, between emaciation and something else. Scabbed. The scabs hurt, but there’s some childish, vindictive joy in digging in his nails and plunging deeper. He feels like warm death. Or feverish death, as the case may be. A certain cruelty paves his thoughts.

Allison nearly trips down the stairs. _Don’t let the door hit you on the way out_ tastes like salt, heavy on his tongue, but his lips won’t move right and his mind is a wide, sluggish track. He manages, “The door,” before his tongue slips and he falls into high laughter. He’s just _laughing_. Just laughing, the sound pinwheeling out of his dry lungs.

The laughter presses into a cackle and then into an ugly, cold wheeze.

He stops short, goes silent, though, when Luther’s eyes meet his. Then a drowsy smile frosts Klaus’s face. “You _deserved_ that.”

Luther sucker-punches him. Right in the stomach. One thing you can say about Spaceboy, about good old Number One—the thing that all the papers say—is that he hits hard. He hits hard.

And so they don’t see Allison after that either. Well, Klaus and Ben see her when they sneak out to the movies. Her first movie’s this siderole in a romcom, and her next one’s a low budget horror film, and the third one’s this campy little indie with Andrew Garfield, but it’s a sleeper hit, and suddenly she has a fragrance line and an eyeliner brand and Klaus can start pawning her things off for _good_ money.

Dad doesn’t say anything. Acts like he doesn’t even notice. Maybe he doesn’t. Klaus forgets sometimes. It’s weird. She’s the first sibling that Klaus really _misses_ -misses. He misses her intervention. He misses her half-mildewed kindness. He misses her. But he’s barely home anyway. And when Dad doesn’t drag her back to the Academy, Klaus starts to think, _I could do that_.

He could do that. Diego does it first.

And Allison’s the first sibling that Klaus misses, but Diego’s the first sibling whose breakaway hurts. He leaves in the middle of the night. Diego doesn’t say a damn word to anyone, not to Klaus or Ben or Luther. Not even to Mom.

Klaus is slumped over the table at breakfast, forehead pressed to the silverware, when Mom’s voice breaks the stillness of a fatherless breakfast. Thank goodness for business trips.

She’s peony-bright as always, skirt the color of garnets and eyes the precise shade of the star of India. The dishsoap fizzes over her yellow gloves like champagne while she hovers over the bottomless sink. “Ben, darling, where’s Diego?”

Ben doesn’t know. No one knows. Mom doesn’t stop smiling, that frozen, eternal smile of hers that’s always reminded Klaus of a doll, but she polishes plates for a little too long. They’re a little too shiny.

The absence of Diego is noticeable. It tips the scales. More empty bedrooms—more closed doors—than filled ones. There’s no number to call, no PO box for letters, no address left behind for friendly brotherly visits.

There’s no more knives in the wall.

Suddenly, the mission dynamics contort, shrink to fit the Academy’s new skin. Klaus can’t just be the lookout anymore; he gets pinned with a defensive role. And _Ben_ —  Ben gets put on the offensive.

It’s a bad tactical move. Ben’s expertise is best employed as a last resort when white flag, trench-deep, _miserable_ failure is imminent. It leaves him gaunt. Grisly. The panes of his face go thread-thin. His ribs bend and warp and crack. Break. Compression wraps. Breathing gets hard, shallow. God. Klaus can’t count on his two hands the number of times Ben comes down with pneumonia. The Horror’s like lying. The more you use it, the easier it becomes. It becomes easier for the monsters to rattle the cage. Ben’s hands shake so bad he can hardly hold up books anymore. Klaus offers him codeine. Ben doesn’t take it. Klaus shrugs. “Your loss.”

Except it’s not. It’s Klaus’s loss because the monsters crush Ben like blackberries. The monsters grind Ben into fucking _sand_.

Klaus is maybe a third sober on his best days—and that’s a number as made up as the one that Allison’s agent gives them when they call her—but that number sinks after Ben’s death. He’s grieving, isn’t he, just leave it be. The grief is the riptide, but it isn’t the wave.

New ghosts—neophytes at haunting the earth for all eternity—are the worst. They just rattle around the world. They haven’t even remembered their human instincts yet. They only ever have one instinct: begging. They beg and beg and beg. Klaus used to help. Klaus used to try to help. He doesn’t anymore. When he used to try, it was almost like he could feel the roughness of their breath on his skin, could feel their fingers on his skin like hot water, could ache every one of their aches.

If he saw Ben beg, Klaus would kill himself.

He forces the beer down his throat until he chokes. He hates beer.

There’s not really a funeral. Or maybe there is. Time is molasses. The whole family gets back together, the whole damn gang except the two dead kids that even Klaus can’t see.

The statue’s up in no time. Klaus doesn’t know when it was ordered, sculpted, put up. It’s almost like he wakes up at the foot of it, rolling the yard’s dead grass between his fingers and yanking it out. His lips hurt. Kissed too much. Too hard maybe. Klaus runs his tongue over his lower lip, feels the keen sting as he tastes blood. Bitten through. Clean. When? “Heya, Benny-boy.”

Listen. The nose of the statue’s all wrong: too wide.

The sunbeams pour heat onto Klaus’s skin, branding it with thick warmth. The milky brightness makes it hard to think — makes him dizzy. Sun-boiled. His fingers are long, bony smears of white against the grotesque saffron of the grass, and the clammy press of his palms against the prickly ground swirls his thoughts like sugar in tea.

“I miss ya.” The bottle is cool against his mouth, the vodka piquing as it kisses the cut on his lip, coloring his voice with a rasp. “I wish you weren’t dead. I wish I could see you. _Real_ you.”

His eyes are hot.

“I—” He yanks a handful of blades of grass out of the ground. “If you’re here...I can’t see you. But I really, _really_ hope you’re not here.” Hope he’s not a ghost. Hope he got to wherever he should be.

Luther takes up a vigil at Ben’s statue. Like he’s protecting him. The bitter part of Klaus thinks, _Too little, too late. You shouldn’t have assigned Ben the offensive_.  

And yet. They’re alone now.

Klaus is hurting, he is. He’s hurting in his chest and his head and his lungs and just about everywhere else. But he’s got something. He’s got jewel-toned drugs and sneaking out on bruised feet and getting bad tattoos with kinda-sorta friends. And he’s been swallowing the idea of death since the day Reginald Hargreeves laid his filthy, wrinkly hands on him.

Luther’s lived his whole life with the windows closed. Docile. Dogmatic. Innocent, or ignorant, or whatever the hell the burden of guilt prescribes for him. He’s got nothing. Nothing but what the Umbrella Academy had almost been.

It’s twelve o’clock in the morning, and the sky is gasoline, and Luther’s sitting cross-cross-applesauce like a little fucking kid in front of Ben’s statue.

Klaus is eighteen. He’s bereaved. He’s manic. He’s only in the house a couple hours a day, and he’s only still there for a place to stay. He’s straddling the window, halfway off the ledge to meet his dealer in town, when he sees Luther, eyes big as the moon. His high’s fading like metal and he’s antsy, fingers jittering so much his nails might just shake off, and he just wants to feel good again, but Luther looks so damn _sad_. (Klaus doesn’t think he can lose another brother.)

“Hey, big guy,” says Klaus weakly, falling most of the way from his window.

Dolefully, Luther offers him a single glance over his shoulder, a tired flick of pale eyes more than anything.

His bare knees scrape against the ground as he draws himself up, trudging toward Luther, tumbling heavily as he sits down beside his brother. It’ll scab soon enough.

“Beautiful night, huh,” he says, at the same time that Luther says, “They all _left_ us.”

Klaus draws his knees up to his chest. “…I—they—you can’t put this on Ben. He just,” the words disappear deep in his throat, “he just _died_ , man.”

“Not him.” Luther’s eyes sink, shiny. “The others.”

“Oh.” Klaus swallows. “They just…grew up, I guess. That’s what you do.”

“It’s their fault. If they had been there—if they had done their jobs and stayed—then Ben wouldn’t have died.” His jaw locks. “It’s their fault.”

Suddenly, Klaus’s eyes sear. His throat closes. “It’s not.”

“If they had just stayed—”

And the softness frays. _It’s your fault. It’s_ your _fucking fault our brother is dead_. “Sometimes.” Klaus’s voice is more tremor than anything. “Sometimes, holding on hurts more than letting go.”

“How are we supposed to even,” Luther breaks his words with a sharp breath. “How am I supposed to lead if everyone’s gone?”

“Not _everyone_.” Klaus stares up at the statue. There’s almost a patina already. And it’s stupid that Ben’s in a mask. He hated that mask. He hated being the Horror. Vaguely, Klaus wonders who designed it. It wasn’t Mom; Mom would have known better. “You’ve still got me.” Still got _mich_.

Luther makes a sound like a scoff. “Yeah.”

Klaus rips out more grass. Luther mourns a statue of a brother he didn’t know anyway. And for the first time in a while, Klaus wishes he could see his siblings. Not as ghosts. Just wishes he could just see them. Missing them is an asteroid cratering his chest. They were just here too—they were here to mourn only a few days ago; Klaus just wasn’t paying attention. But Klaus isn’t Luther; he knows when to let go. It doesn’t matter how much he misses them. He knows how to let go.

The gasoline of the night sky burns into morning, and Klaus wakes up to the dark orange sunrise and kisses from a million gnats and the worst hangover he’s had in a while. His brain is cotton and his teeth are wide and liquid. It doesn’t feel right.

Luther must have gone inside sometime during the night. This makes it the second time Klaus has fallen asleep at the foot of Ben’s dumb fucking memorial. Disappointing, honestly. Didn’t even get his fix last night.

The heels of his palms dig into his eyes, blocking out the too-wide world and the hot sky and Pogo’s sad look as he stumbles inside. His legs sway up the stairs, and, God, he must be at least two-thirds sober now; he’s never had a come-down this miserable, this _quiet_.

He groans, and he peels his hands away from his face, vision sparkling like clean water and fireworks, fingertips bruised and fingernails dirty. The empty hallway with empty rooms stretches out a kilometer or two, almost, clouding him with some sad pastiche of childhood nostalgia. A hard, blue-tinted wave of _something_ crashes over Klaus as his hand passes the knife-scratched panel of Diego’s door for the smooth wood of Ben’s. The lock on that door only works from the outside thanks to dear old Daddy, and Klaus only hesitates for a heartbeat before he twists it open.

Thick planes of shelves, books upon books, lace the walls, hard horizontal stripes broken by laundry baskets tall with unwashed clothes. _Othello’_ s on his nightstand, dog-eared, with the tacky bookmark Allison got Ben for their eighth birthday parting the pages in half.

And on the bed is. Is.

“Hey, Klaus,” says Ben.

Klaus’s skin turns to stone, trembling stone. “No, _no_ , no. I don’t want to see you. I didn’t want to _see_ you.” His pulse ricochets, hard in his temples-wrists-chest, pummeling his veins. “I wasn’t,” his breath catches, “I wasn’t _supposed to_ _see_ you.”

And that’s the day that Klaus leaves. Blows the proverbial popsicle stand. Grabs crank from his room and a Caravaggio from the hallway to sell. Outruns the ghosts. Tries to, anyway.

That’s when the drugs stop working. They still ward off the ghosts, the bad ghosts, the hushed whispers, the gray eyes that cling to his skin, all the phantoms and their phantom aches. But Ben persists, a black smear in his periphery with no regard for the tessellation of sky-colored bruises or dark scabs tracked along Klaus’s veins.

Good people don’t become ghosts. Still, Ben remains. For a decade. Maybe more. He doesn’t beg; he never does. But Klaus doesn’t ever really stop trying to not see him anymore.

 


End file.
